Blue Iris Pro v4.xx () Video Camera Security Software - Full License Life

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by tecy30Jul 18, 2018

Blue Iris v4 Review.

All IP cameras come with their own software, and its features, quality, and reliability will differ from camera to camera maker. One common thing that many cameras share with their own software is lack of control over motion detection. The second common thing your find is their software will record short clips based off motion triggers, so how the motion detection works is of great importance, more so if you wish to be notified by an alarm or push notification yet at 3am in the morning it was just a cat walking by.

Some IP cameras support onvif which is the ability to work with 3rd party software, this greatly expands the cameras usage, and today I'm going to talk about such as 3rd party piece of software called Blue Iris.

Blue Iris at v4 at the time of writing opens up a huge scope of options to add multiple cameras to a home made server PC. It don't support Mac which I'm sure is a shame for many, but the type of PC your be using is a very basic server PC dedicated to this task, its not a PC your be loading all of your software on for every day use, although you can do this.

I had purchased a Reolink 422w camera, and downloaded a trial version of Blue Iris onto my Lenovo Yoga 3 i7 laptop. It was noted in the instructions I may need to take note of the IP address of my camera, this can be got from the client main software you get with your camera. The client main software you get with your camera is still used for its initial set up and to set the resolution you wish to use, but once this is done you may never need to open it again. Your also in most cases need to set your pre-sets up in the client software regarding PTZ cameras.

Once I opened up Blue Iris I added a new camera and found the layout so intuitive I didn't need to follow any further instructions. It scanned for available cameras, found mine, then I just selected a preset profile which is in my case was Reolink. After this about 12 seconds later I had a live stream of my camera, it couldn't have been any more simple.

One of the main reasons I needed this software was I needed much more control over motion detection. I had many obstacles to get around that would trigger false Positive triggers such as flying insects, blowing trees, shadows from trees, cats, and foxes, head lights from cars at night. The original client software would stand no chance at getting around any of these issues, and I wasnt even sure it would be possible to get to 100% true accuracy with any software at all.

For each camera there are up to 7 profiles each of which can be set up with their own motion detection settings, and triggers. These profiles are used within a schedule for that camera or within a global schedule in which all cameras follow. I set up a profile for Day, Evening, Night and Dawn so I had more control over how it all worked at different times of the day and night.

The first thing I set up was trigger zones, areas in which would act as a mask to stop motion being monitored outside these zones. To get to this you go into the Trigger tab where by default Motion sensor is checked on. Clicking configure opens the main page where you set up all the rules for motion detection. On this page two options are also on by default which are Object detection and Use Zones and hot spots with a edit button besides each option. In Blue Iris you have up to 6 zones per camera plus a hot spot zone that is hyper sensitive to any movement. The 7 zones allow for a much deeper set up with a host of rules that determine when, what, and how that zone should treat motion, and how it should respond to that motion based on the set rules. So I set up a zone for my drive way and path initially, and set up some global rules that all zones must follow. The zones are added by using either a paint brush adjusting a size setting, or with a rectangular tool to cover a larger area, these two methods can be combined. On the main motion detection page there are sensitivity settings. This is made up by two settings Min object size, and Min Contrast. The Min size right off the bat helps you eradicate false positive triggers from animals, it will only respond to objects over a set Min size. Of course this wont help if a cat get too close to the camera as the object gets bigger as it gets closer, but I found I never got any false positive triggers from a cat again. Next was the Contrast. This is helpful to help determine the sensitivity between the moving object and the background contrast. Its a simple slider which I found at night time was best set to 100% sensitivity. The next level of control is Object detection. Within here allot can be done to refine motion detection.. Object travels (Pixels) will eradicate objects that do not meet the set pixel movement. The higher the value the less notice Blue Iris with take of objects moving within a short space, or pixel movement. A slight movement of a tree for instance can be ignored while a person walking acrossRead full review